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I’ve recently returned from a long roadtrip holidays in the states, and along with a large number of souvenirs, I also returned with rather a lot of photos. Whilst on the road, I had been able to copy the photos from memory card to a laptop, and I was reviewing the photos using Picassa. Prior to leaving on my Holidays I had change camera, and my new camera had the ability to shoot in Canon CR2 RAW format. I had hardly used the new camera before leaving, and imagine my disappointment when, after the first full day of shooting I return to the hotel room and review the photos, only to find that the RAW files I have a being rendered in Picasa with a rather strange rose tint. Now I knew that while I may have been viewing San Francisco with ‘Rose tinted spectacles’ , my camera certainly did not have any such filter on it.

It turned out that this was a bug in Picasa, which had been about for a while, with no sign of a solution. For the rest of the holiday, I made sure that the camera was shooting both RAW and JPEG so I could at least review the photos each day.

Upon returning to the UK I gave Picasa another chance, and checked that I had the latest version of the product using the Check for Updates option. Nothing happened, so I (wrongly) assumed that I had the latest version. A little more reading about the problem revealed that the issue had been fixed in the latest version of Picasa, and upon checking the version number of my Picasa installation, the one mentioned in the Google Groups message, and the one for the latest version on the Picasa website, I discovered a discrepancy.

One final Check for Update followed, to no avail, and I resorted to manually downloading the installer and installing over the top of my current install.

The update resolved my problem, and I could see the fantastic difference between the RAW versions and the in camera JPEG versions. It also taught me two lessions:

Always Always Always take photos in RAW format – even without any post processing the image quality blows the in camera JPEG images away .

When Implementing update checks in applications, don’t ever let them lie to the user.